Just then, the screams of Xena’s neighbor, skinny old Mr. Terryman, began ripping through the night. She knew his ugly rasp anywhere; she had heard it enough over the last year through their connecting wall. She glanced up once, swallowed as if she had a wad of bubblegum caught in her throat and had to push away the mental picture her mind had concocted of the old dude’s death. She had seen enough zombie movies to picture Mr. Terryman’s flesh stretching like rubber as it was pulled from his body.
“I tell ya what I know,” she told the group. “None of us is gettin’ across the Hudson. Ain’t none of you are any kinda Olympic swimmers.” This was solid truth. The Hudson was just too wide to attempt to swim in their bulky winter coats and they would freeze without them. “The only way we’re gonna get to New Jersey is if we can steal a boat or beg a ride from some ship, and we all know that ain’t never gonna happen.”
“Then we go east,” Funky Pits stated and turned in that direction, ready to march. The alley was dark as a dungeon to the east and he hesitated.
“How’s going east gonna help?” Xena demanded, her voice rising. She planed her hands on the flare of her hips and asked, “Ya know this is an island, right?” This brought on a heavy silence broken only by Mr. Terryman’s screams; he wasn’t going down easily.
Long Island was aptly named, being both long, running a hundred miles in a generally eastward direction, and an island, one that receded further from the mainland the further east you went. Xena pictured them fleeing endlessly up the island only to find themselves stranded on some beach with ten miles of ocean between them and any sort of safety.
“You got a better idea?” Funky Pits demanded, hate for her in his eyes.
“What about north?” she asked. “Is the RFK Bridge still okay?”
No one knew and as they stared about waiting for someone else to answer, Funky Pits nudged a smaller, rounder man standing next to him. The shadows of the alley seemed to be swaying but there was no wind, and even if there were, the shadows of trees might sway but six story buildings did not.
Zombies were coming.
Ms. Wilcox held her ridiculous gun out with two shaking hands. “What do we do?”
“We fight,” Funky Pits answered. It was a powerful and deeply stupid reply. Those with guns leveled them as the shadows advanced. While they did, Xena took a quick look back and saw she could run. I should run, she thought, but just then, the first zombie appeared. This one looked like it had been run over by a bus and then lit on fire.
It could barely walk and the two behind it were in worse shape.
“Ready,” Funky Pits intoned. “Aim…fire!” The first zombie went down under the barrage of six guns. The gunshots were like explosions and left their ears ringing. Funky Pits raised his voice to say again, “Ready, aim…”
“Hold on!” Xena cried. “We can’t waste bullets like…”
In the middle of her sentence, Funky Pits barked, “Fire!” The guns went off again and the two leading zombies dropped, but neither died. They lay on the ground moaning.
“You don’t have a fuckin’ clue what the fuck you’re doin’, do ya?” she demanded. “You don’t got no plan or nothin’.”
“I have more’n you and if you don’t like the way I do things, you can fucking leave.”
She wanted to leave and she tried to. Spinning about, she tromped off west down the alley only to have everyone catch up seconds later. The gunfire had brought a small horde charging. “If you guys listen to me,” she said to them, “we’ll make it out of here alive.”
That had been three hours before. Three hours of running and fighting had gotten them a mile away as the crow flies, though their journey through sewers and across rooftops had been closer to seven. At the end of those terrifying three hours, the group had been whittled down to just Xena and Funky Pits, whose real name was Steve. She had kept no one alive. Ms. Wilcox had been the first to die, dragged down from behind after only two blocks. She tried to blast her way free, but her six shots went quickly. She should’ve saved a bullet for herself. Death by zombie can be a slow process and her wails followed them for blocks.
The others in the group either ran off to die alone or were killed one after another.
At times their running fight merged with other fights and the tremendous din of battle, the gunshots, shouts, and screams would sometimes swell to fill the night, then fall away to nothing. Sometimes groups of desperate people joined them and at other times, they ran from groups who were neck deep in the dead. In all, their flight could be boiled down to endless confusion, horrific pain, and over-riding fear.
Fear kept them moving and kept the two alive until the last. Strangely, it was when their situation was the most desperate that their fear left them.
“What do you think?” Steve asked, leaning in close. Xena smiled softly and when she nodded, the tips of their noses touched. He nuzzled his nose to hers and then kissed her long and deep. It was the most romantic kiss she’d ever had. There was love and such tenderness in it that her eyes welled, and it was then, after the worst three hours of her life she realized that she could love this man. He was brave and strong and generous. Three hours of fighting had revealed everything there was to know about him and he was everything she had secretly been looking for in a lover.
But there was no time for love.
And no space either, not when they were seventy feet up at the top of an industrial fuel tank the size of their apartment building. The air reeked of chemicals and the narrow stairs beneath them vibrated as hundreds of the dead clawed their way up.
They had hoped that by jumping the fence of the fuel storage site that the stench would mask their scent. It should’ve. By all that was natural, they should’ve been able to escape; however, there were things amongst the zombies that were not natural at all. It was one thing to see how some sort of germ or virus might make a zombie out of a person, but these others were like a cross between a dog and a human. They went on all fours, snuffling and sniffing.
Now the pair were trapped, their sweat freezing on their brows.
“We’ll be warm soon enough,” Steve told her. He leaned out over the drop and stripped off his coat. It would burn readily enough since minutes earlier he had fallen into what had looked like a great black puddle. It had been much deeper than it appeared and stank of kerosene.
Taking the coat, he went to a curved pipe that jutted from the tank and shoved it inside as far as his arm reached. The smell coming from the pipe was enough to make his head swim. The pipe was part of the venting system that kept the dangerous fumes from building up. Like the other tanks around them, the system had a back-up generator in place, unlike the others, which had kicked on when the power went down, the tank’s generator had failed.
Xena had chosen this tank to hide on for the very reason it was darker than the others. The dark and the stench had not mattered to the dead, and the fact that the half-filled tank was already swelling slightly from the pent-up fumes didn’t make any difference to her or Steve. They were going to die one way or another.
Three hours of running and fighting had worn them down to nothing and they had barely made the climb.
“Do we wait to light it?” Xena asked, looking down at the horde. There had to be a hundred of them on the stairs and ten times that many swarming all around the base of the tank.
He took her cold hand and squeezed it. “I want to wait. I want every second I can get with you, but it could take some time to blow.” They stared into each other’s eyes and knew the mind of the other. “We’ll go out in a big way. We’ll do it right.” She grinned. The inevitability of their deaths had become obvious an hour before and acceptance had changed to anticipation the moment they realized what the great tanks were.
“Light it,” she told him.
With a casual flick of a little plastic lighter, he set the coat burning. This ignited the fumes, which flared so quickly and so violently that they turned away. It was too bright to look at and so they
went to the rail and stared out over the dead at the dark city. It was the least romantic view imaginable and yet, they put their arms around each other and sighed.
Beneath them was a bomb of epic proportion. The tank was only half filled which only made it deadlier. When it comes to fuel explosions it’s always the build-up of fumes that results in larger explosions.
“Will it hurt?” she asked. The heat from the pipe was shocking and she could feel her skin dry and stretch.
He grinned and answered, “I really don’t think so. It’ll happen in a…”
The tank, filled with half a million gallons of fuel, exploded, proving him correct. The explosion was equal to a kiloton of TNT and had the effect of essentially disintegrating Steve, Xena and a thousand zombies in an instant. It lit up the night like a supernova and the shockwave that roared out from it hit the city like a tornado.
It was this grey wall of destruction that Maddy saw coming at her high up in the clinic. She dragged Billy behind an exam table a fraction of a second before it struck the building, rocking it on its foundation and blasting the glass inward. Deadly shrapnel lanced through the air and would’ve sliced them to ribbons if she had not acted.
The roar of sound, a great furious thunderclap that went on and on, left them stunned and it was sometime before they could sit up. When they did, they could only stare out into Queens in disbelief. A great burning torch rose into the air, higher than even the tallest skyscrapers.
Chapter 8
At ground level, having swept over a mile and a half of piled-together cars, and after pouring in and around buildings, the shockwave was far less destructive when it hit the quarantine tents outside the Federal Building. By then it was little more than a screaming wind that stank of petrol.
Bryce slept right through it and he didn’t stir as people ran from the tent to stare up at the great column of fire stretching into the sky. Griff slept as well, though he did not sleep nearly as soundly. He moaned and jerked, while sweat poured from him.
Agent Plinkett did his best to shield him from the others, but that proved impossible. They clamored for the guards and the FBI agent had to pull his gun to keep them from shooting Griff as he slept. An agreement was reached in which Griff was double zip-tied hand and foot. Still, none of the others would come near their end of the tent. They formed a single glaring, frightened group that hissed constantly about the unfairness of the world.
An hour after the explosion, Bryce and Griff woke at the same time. The two were stretched out on the floor of the tent, separated by five feet. They stared into each other’s eyes in silence. Bryce’s eyes had turned a luminous blue, while Griff’s were murky and muddled, with patches of blue against a black field.
“She’s coming,” Bryce said.
“She is,” Griff agreed through cracked lips.
They could feel Maddy’s presence growing in their minds and both felt a hunger. For Griff it was something he refused to name. He wanted more of her blood. He hated and despised it, but craved it, nonetheless. Bryce’s hunger was just that: hunger. He was starving again, and the smell of approaching ham and cheese reared up a monster in his belly, which growled its demands.
“Hey!” barked one of the women in the group as Maddy ducked into the tent. “She’s not supposed to be able to come and go willy-nilly as she pleases. She could be bringing in the virus!”
“I washed my hands,” Maddy assured her with an insincere smile. She had washed more than her hands. On the way out of the clinic, she had caught sight of herself in a mirror and saw what a disheveled, filthy creature she had become. Her rags were even more raggedy than ever, making her look like some sort of hobo, and the dried zombie blood that speckled her couldn’t be healthy.
Fortunately, the clinic had enough rubbing alcohol and peroxide to bathe in. A change of clothes was more difficult to come by and she had worn only a lab coat and disposable slippers until she and Billy had found a little clothing shop with a smashed-in door. A half-eaten body made trying on new clothes something of a drag, but discovering she had dropped to a size 6 more than made up for it.
She chose navy blue yoga pants and a soft grey sweater. When Billy wasn’t looking, she checked out her ass in a mirror and nearly cried.
“Whatcha doing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, spinning quickly. “We should go.” She had been squeezing her own buns in disbelief. They were nice. I have a nice ass. It was the stupidest thing to be thinking about with a dead body sprawled not ten feet away and zombies outside in the street, but it couldn’t be helped. She had never had a nice ass and now she did. All it had taken to get it were the deaths of millions of people.
That cooled her down somewhat.
From there they had moved onto yet another deli—these seemed to be everywhere in New York—and filled a bag with enough sandwich fixings to feed ten grown men. She expected half to go to Bryce but the way he sat up, very much like a dog, she adjusted her expectations higher.
Bryce set to it with a will and his moaning, something too much like ecstasy in Maddy’s opinion, was disconcerting as well as distracting. “Who’s the kid?” he asked the one second his mouth was somewhat empty.
“His name’s Billy and he’s very brave.”
The kid looked uncomfortable and drawn as if he’d had a tough time of it. We all have, Bryce thought, working his left shoulder around in a circle, trying to loosen the muscles around his injury. Of course, I haven’t just lost my mother. There was no need to ask if he had. It was a fact in Bryce’s mind.
“It’s a tough world, now,” he said to Billy, “but you’re tough for a…ten-year-old. You’re ten, right?” Another fact. Bryce needed whatever intuitive help he could get with the boy. Beyond having been one himself, Bryce had little knowledge of young boys, and he had not been a normal boy. Baseball had taken a backseat to books, and football a backseat to formulas. When he had been ten, he had wished to be tough. It had been a wish ungranted. “Yeah, you’re a tough one.”
Billy gave a little shrug and dropped his eyes. He sat next to Maddy in a little ball with his knees pulled up to his chest. She patted his knee and then looked over the gear she had brought back, trying to figure out the IV set up. She’d had IVs before and knew there was no great secret to it. For the most part inserting one seemed to take little more than a deft touch.
Trying to ignore Griff’s aroma, she rolled up his sleeve. She had caught his scent the moment she had opened the tent flap. There was a hint of the demon to him. It wasn’t a zombie smell, it was definitely the demon. A shiver wanted to roll across her shoulders; she went stiff to hold it back.
“This might sting,” she warned, forcing a fake smile. She then glanced over to Bryce, who had just finished his sandwich; it had been enormous. “Pay attention. You’re going to have to stick me next.”
“I got it,” he told her, tearing open another hoagie roll. “The pointy part goes in your arm, right?” He was feeling so much better now that there was food in his belly; it gave him the strength to smile. In return, Maddy flashed a “oh you’re sooo funny,” look, but only for a half a second, before she bent over Griff’s arm. She feared that because he was treading so close to death his veins would be weak and tear, or so shriveled from lack of blood that she wouldn’t be able to slide the needle in properly.
Her fears were well-founded. His veins were like thin little worms that squiggled away from her questing needle, time and again. He was stiff, his lips pressed together, holding in pain that went far beyond the needle. His entire body thrummed with bone-grinding agony. Glass in his joints, fire in his head, a storm in his belly. The needle was only an afterthought and he didn’t even notice when Maddy finally felt the pop as it slid into the vein.
Quickly, she connected the tubing and lashed it all down with enough tape to hold an 80’s Ford together. “Now my turn,” she said, feeling a nasty turn in her guts; it was like she was doing something wrong, or naughty. Was she feeding a growing demon or
saving Griff?
Bryce jammed a quarter of a sandwich into his mouth, licked his fingers free of mayo, and went to grab the IV catheter. Maddy smacked his greasy hand away. “Clean your hands for goodness sakes.”
“Clean my…” he began before bursting into laughter. He laughed so hard that his chest wound threatened to reopen. “Look around you, Mad. It’s a dirty world now. You better get used to it.”
“Wash. Your. Hands.” She threw alcohol packets at him. “You worked in a lab for goodness sakes. You should know better!”
He did know better; better than ever, at least on some fronts. He knew that no germ, microbe, or virus could touch him now. Or Maddy, or Agent Griffin Meyers, for that matter. No, Griff was beyond germs one way or another; this was a thought that didn’t sit well with Bryce. He glanced over the kid, and found Maddy looking at him. She felt the same thing. She was worried that Griff was becoming something terrible, and yet, there was a chance to save him. It could go either way, but they owed him the chance. They would never have made it out of the hospital if it hadn’t been for him.
Bryce nodded, a slight bob of his head. They would go on with their plan to dose him with a good deal more of her blood.
Maddy’s arms were so much slimmer now that Bryce had no problem finding her vein. It was her arteries that distracted him. They thumped pleasantly beneath his touch and seemed to create some sort of conduit to her heart. Its beat was slow and easy, and strangely alluring. He didn’t want to look up at her face, but he did nonetheless and found her staring back, alarmed and also feeling oddly shy, as if he was feeling something deeper, something private.
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